Six Key Highlights from Opticon London 2024
Opticon London 2024 brought some exciting yet ground-breaking announcements that showcase Optimizely's commitment to empowering marketers and businesses with cutting-edge tools and capabilities. Here are 6 of our favourites.
1. Acquisition of NetSpring: Supercharging Data Analytics
Optimizely have significantly strengthened their data analytics capabilities with the acquisition of NetSpring. This powerful addition will allow customers to analyse the substantial amount of data they already have in their data warehouse and turn it into actionable insights – all without needing to make any changes to the data itself.
The integration will first come to Web Experimentation to help provide marketers with deeper insights into the how and why of experiment outcomes. NetSpring's capabilities will also significantly boost the depth and relevance of insights from the Optimizely Data Platform (ODP) in the future which we're excited to see.
2. Opal's Evolution: AI Gets Smarter with Context
Optimizely has a unique advantage with access to extensive first-party data across its various products. By using relevant parts of this data to enhance Opal through Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), the AI gains a deeper, more relevant understanding of marketers' goals and the types of tasks they are likely to be doing.
This advancement enables Opal to move beyond basic suggestions and into the realm of truly assisting marketers in automating repetitive day-to-day tasks.
3. AI Playbook: Practical Guidance for Marketers
Recognizing the rapid advancements in AI and the potential for information overload, Optimizely has created a free AI playbook. This resource offers practical advice and guidance on how marketers can harness AI to enhance their most common tasks, helping you navigate the AI landscape with confidence.
>>> Check out the AI playbook: A practical guide to AI for Marketers.
4. CMS 13 and Visual Builder: A New Era for “Traditional” Content Management
The newly launched SaaS CMS has rightfully been getting a lot of attention over the past year, including from us. However, we're finally starting to see PaaS CMS 13 coming on the horizon arriving sometime next year.
PaaS CMS 13 will benefit greatly from its new version-less SaaS sibling by borrowing some of its standout features such as the Visual Builder and enhanced integrations with Graph. Visual Builder for PaaS customers will be a completely new way for editors to create and manage content in a more intuitive interface that aims to achieve beyond what on-page editing ever could.
It is worth calling out that implementing Visual Builder for many existing PaaS customers will likely need careful planning and some development effort, it probably won't just be a new "turn it on" feature. We are already looking into ways to make this as simple as possible for our customers as we're sure Visual Builder will be a highly sought after feature by all PaaS marketers once CMS 13 arrives.
5. Personalization as a Standalone Product
Optimizely has long provided personalization features in its core products, such as the CMS and Commerce Connect, allowing marketers to personalize content to meet specific end-user needs. This capability is powerful, as demonstrated by Niteco's work with Steadfast during the Sitecore-Optimizely migration project, where implementing Optimizely Content Recommendations resulted in a remarkable 286% increase in clicks on content in the “related articles” sections.
They have now taken things a step further and are expanding the personalization capabilities into a stand-alone product. We’re looking forward as key features to this are rolled out in Q4 this year.
6. Edge Delivery: Solving the Flicker Problem
In the world of web experimentation there has been a longstanding trade-off customers had to make. They would either have to sacrifice some website performance or find other ways of dealing with "flicker" - where the original content would briefly show before the web experiment content had the chance to replace it.
Optimizely have announced they have finally solved this problem once and for all with Edge Delivery. This approach will essentially run the experimentation “logic” on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) rather than on the user's browser. Shifting this processing to the edge should completely eliminate the flicker problem while still allowing for solid website performance. We're very excited to give the Beta a try.
Summary
Optimizely continues to broaden what's possible with Optimizely One and these announcements demonstrate their commitment to providing marketers and digital leaders with the tools they need to succeed in an increasingly complex landscape.
If you want to learn more about Optimizely or how any of these announcements could benefit your business
to transform your business and drive results?
